This invention relates generally to information processing. More specifically, the invention relates to providing an interface for using a web service on an external server device.
A web service is an application component accessed via the Internet. An information processing apparatus can provide a distributed component environment through a network by using the web service on an external server device. The information processing apparatus using the web service sends out a SOAP message in a format corresponding to the web service and receives a response from the web service. Conventionally, a program executed by the information processing apparatus using the web service generates a request message, and receives and interprets the same in the web service, using an OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) model.
A HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document or an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) document, for example, which is used by a web browser application (hereinafter, simply referred to as a browser), is created based on a tree structure model, such as the DOM (Document Object Model).
A programming model for the web service based on the OOP model is described in, for example, H. Kreger, “Web services conceptual architecture (wsca 1.0). Technical report”, May, 2001, IBM Software Group, Internet <URL: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/solutions/webservices/pdf/WSCA.pdf> and in S. Loughran and E. Smith, “Rethinking the Java SOAP stack”, U.S., 2005, In ICWS, P. 845-852. The operation of the DOM (Document Object Model) as a web service is described in, for example, G. Fox, H, Bulut, K. Kim, S.-H. Ko, S. Lee, S. Oh, S. Pallickara, X. Qiu A. Uyar, M. Wang, and W. Wu, “Collaborative web services and peer-to-peer girds”, U.S., 2003, In Collaborative Technologies Symposium, and in X. Qiu, B. Carpenter, and G. Fox, “Internet collaboration using the w3c document object model”, U.S., 2003, In International Conference on Internet Computing, pages 643-647.